Independent (and very excellent) political analysis site criticises blatant pro-Government bias in The Australian.

The Australian contacts the author and advises that the newspaper is going to “go” him in its main editorial.

The Australian publishes an unbelievably hypocritical, inward-looking, arrogant, and fatuous sermon about how it is the only objective source of information in the known universe and anyone who claims otherwise is a parasitic, worthless bottom-feeder.

News Ltd blog criticises blatant pro-Government bias in The Australian.

The relevant News Ltd blog disappears in the night (see “CODA” here, too, for a comment from the original author, who so far hasn’t disappeared in the night).

The missing blog post gets posted elsewhere… and reposted… and reposted, while The Government Gazette continues to believe its own spin and sinks further and further into irrelevance as a source of worthwhile political news and analysis (originally from Blogocracy, before it vanished):

Who says the mainstream media don’t pay attention to the blogosphere? This extraordinary story relates to this week’s Newspoll results and the way The Australian reported it. Peter Brent runs the excellent psephological blog called Mumble. It’s one of a number of blogs that run analysis and commentary of opinion polls, and others include OzPolitics, Possums Pollytics, and Poll Bludger.
Yesterday, Peter Brent noted that he had fallen foul of some of those at The Australian:

A courtesy call from Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell this morning informed me that the paper is going to “go” Charles Richardson (from Crikey) and me tomorrow. Chris said by all means criticise the paper, but my “personal” attacks on Dennis had gone too far, and the paper will now go me “personally”.

No, I’m not making this up.

If they only get as personal as I get with Dennis, then it should be tame, as I don’t believe I’ve ever criticised anything other than his writing. And to think I described Dennis, in a chapter in a book being launched this month, as (with no sarcasm) “a fine journalist”.
All very strange. And – I’d be lying if I didn’t admit – a little stomach-churning.

The editorial is up this morning and yes, they do “go” Peter Brent. They defend themselves in the strongest possible terms and attack, specifically and generally, just about anyone who disagrees with them, particularly “Australia’s online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people’s work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society’s pool of knowledge.”
There are a number of things to say about all of this. The first is that the editorial is as much concerned about charges of bias against The Australian as anything else. This is how it begins:

THE measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth. Bias, nonetheless, is in the eye of the beholder and some people will always see conspiracy when the facts don’t suit their view of the world. This is the affliction that has gripped, to a large measure, Australia’s online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people’s work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society’s pool of knowledge.

If bias is in the eye of the beholder, then there are a lot of “beholders” out there who think The Australian is biased, particularly in its coverage of polling data. The evidence for this is not just to found in the blogosphere but on their own pages where their columns and articles often fill up with criticism from their own readers accusing them of spinning information in favour of the Howard Government. In attacking the “online commentariat” they are also attacking a sizeable sampling of their own readership.
The latest bout of charges of bias were prompted by this week’s Newspoll and many people, including me, were struck by the way The Australian chose to cover the story. For instance, Bryan Palmer at OzPolitics wrote:

“When I first glanced at today’s headlines — Howard checks Rudd’s march — Kevin’s sizzle not snag-free — Howard finds fertile ground for support — I was expecting to read about a polling improvement for the Howard Government. What I found was a flat line.”

What’s interesting is that The Australian seems to believe that only they are capable of objectivity and they reject entirely any charge of bias. This is odd given that Chris Mitchell himself has said:

“Can I say something about The Australian’s contribution to the national political debate. It has made, as a newspaper, a remarkable contribution, I think back over the last 10 years that this government has been in office and I think of the positions taken by The Australian newspaper.

“It has been broadly supportive, generously so, of the government’s economic reform agenda. And it has been a strong supporter, consistently… of industrial relations reform. Its only criticism of the government is that it might not have gone far enough.”

…I think editorially and on the Op Ed page, we are right-of-centre. I don’t think it’s particularly far right, I think some people say that, but I think on a world kind of view you’d say we’re probably pretty much where The Wall Street Journal, or The Telegraph in London are. So, you know, centre-right.

It is precisely that “generous” “broadly supportive” “right-of-centre” tilt that people are responding to when they see Newspoll reported the way it was this week. For the editorial to deny that any such tilt exist seems disingenuous.

So I think the editorial is ill-conceived and way off the mark in singling out Peter Brent in the way that it does. His site largely confines itself to interpretation and in doing so, provides a great service. The idea that he can’t comment without the editor of The Australian ringing him up to say they are going to “go” him is disturbing.

Still, I think it is fair to say that News Ltd, including The Australian, has opened itself to comment and criticism from its readership more so than Fairfax, the other major news organisation. They have embraced readers comments and “blogs” more fully, and this site alone is evidence of that. So while most News news stories and columns allow reader comment, the same is not true of Fairfax. You can, for instance, comment on Dennis Shanahan’s and Paul Kelly’s columns, but not Michelle Grattan’s or Gerard Henderson’s.

But having embraced such an approach, they have to accept that not everyone is going to agree with them or buy into their particular take on a given issue or, indeed, their own self-image. The Australian is, of course, completely free to defend themselves, but it might also pay them to reflect on why so many people see them as the “government gazette” rather than just dismiss nearly all such criticism as “a waste of time”.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Bahnisch comments, as does AB at Surfdom. Possum Pollytics provides a detailed analysis of an aspect of Newspoll that argues against the claim, made by the CEO of Newspoll and Dennis Shanahan, about the relationship between primary vote and the preferred PM figure. It’s exactly the sort of analysis that the editorial claims is lacking in the online sites.

…the fate of journalists will always be linked to that of the whistleblowers who provide them with the information. If there is no protection for whistleblowers, hopes for a better balance between government secrets and the public’s right to know will be unrealised. And the slide towards less accountable, less transparent governments will continue unabated.

Read on…

Edit: fixed bad link.

Never before in the history of opinion polls have such diabolical numbers for a political party been so spruced up as those in today’s Australian. According to Mr Shanahan, “John Howard and the Coalition have got a polling breather.”

You can see some actual analysis of the latest Newspoll and AC Nielsen polls here and here respectively.

Blair notes (about ten years late, it seems) that misleading information can make it hard to make sound decisions about the future:

The damage saps the country’s confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself and its institutions; and above all it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions in the right spirit for the future.

He doesn’t mention whether he considers such ‘decisions’ to include the random invasion of other countries. And of course he blames the media, not his own spin doctors, for the breakdown in the previously blissful marriage between government and media in England, and in typically New Labour fashion he then proposes a centralisation and consolidation of government control over the media as the best solution (not, for example, only telling the truth and speaking as objectively as possible at all times when in government).

How will Blair be remembered? Sometimes he gives the distinct impression of being a very ideological person who believes what he is doing is entirely good and right, and believes it very strongly. Sometimes it’s even possible to feel sorry for him for lashing himself to the mast of the foundering ship of the Bush Administration in a fit of trans-Atlantic comradeship after September 11.

But only sometimes.

Saddam Hussein’s regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.

- in the House of Commons, April 2002

I think most people who have dealt with me, think I’m a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am.

- in the happier days of 1997

In the years since 9/11, there have been quite a few interrupted terrorist plots. It now seems possible to exercise some judgment about their gravity. Not all plots are the same. In this case, law enforcement officials said that J.F.K. was never in immediate danger. The plotters had yet to lay out plans. They had no financing. Nor did they have any explosives. It is with all that in mind, that the editors in charge this weekend did not put this story on the front page.

Indeed, further reports suggest that, even if it had been carried out, there was no way the terrorist plan would have had the intended effect of causing an explosion throughout the fuel lines feeding the airport – at most it would have started serious fires. As noted above, the plotters were nowhere near executing their plan, either.

Of course our only national newspaper, which unlike the Times is quite a long way away from New York, was not so restrained, but then it’s almost laughable to imagine the newspaper exercising the same sort of restraint and judgment. Here is an excerpt from The Oz’s main editorial from 5 June 2007:

THE revelation that four men from the Caribbean nations of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago were charged with conspiring to blow up the pipelines of John F. Kennedy Airport has again exposed the hydra-headed threat posed by Islamist terrorists.

ACTU president Sharan Burrow has used her influence to blacken Australia’s name…

Having the leader of the opposition approve appointments is not perfect – it maintains the two-party duopoly that dominates the Australian political landscape and effectively guarantees that someone from within the establishment will always be appointed – but it is certainly a lot better than having not-so-subtle ideology driving appointments. Most importantly, with each major party unable to appoint an obvious political hack, there is far more chance that someone will be appointed on merit, of all things.

It is also perhaps the best resolution to the ‘culture wars’ – implicit recognition that it is not for the federal government, or any government, to determine what content is or is not the ‘right’ version of history or contemporary culture. As such, creating an ideology-neutral (rather than “balanced”, per se) intellectual environment is essential.

This approach needs to be considered for use far more widely. Judicial appointments, in particular, are an area which might well benefit significantly from a move towards a non-partisan appointment process. As pointed out here, the ALP has also proposed a bipartisan approach to determine the composition of future federal industrial relations bodies.

The headline is a reference to the proposal that Australia implement a carbon trading scheme to (finally) start doing something about our greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon trading works, in part, on the basis of charging businesses for the greenhouse gases they produce. Therefore this headline could be rephrased as follows, and be just as informative:

“Making producing carbon dioxide more expensive will make producing carbon dioxide more expensive.”

Of course that won’t stop the media and others running a ridiculous scare campaign about how this will ‘hurt the economy’ and ‘hit consumers in the hip pocket’ without acknowledging that that is the whole point of the proposal, making people pay for damage to the environment so that it is regulated by the wonders of the market. Still, the ABC should probably get some sort of prize for stating the bleeding obvious and taking presenting non-information as news to new levels.

(Similar comments at AnonymousLefty here).

Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

Now comes the not-so-excellent news that the ABC is – against the advice of its science reporter and as a result of pressure from the board on the director of television – showing a ‘controversial’ (some might say, ‘moronic’) documentary which claims that global warming is a lie and the Earth is actually getting hotter because (obviously) the sun is getting hotter. This is a theory which has not attracted much support from, you know, scientists familiar with the sun and the Earth’s climate, but what would they know? And of course if it’s the sun, and not greenhouse gases produced by human activity, then that means that it’s ok for us to do nothing: we can keep digging up and burning everything we can get our opposable digits on, and even if we burn to a crisp as the temperature rises we can keep ourselves cool with calming thoughts that we’re not to blame, it’s the sun (or perhaps adopt Monty Burns’ philosophy that “since the dawn of time man has longed to destroy the sun” and launch the ‘War on Solar’).

This episode showcases one of the most dangerous aspects of public dialogue in the early 21st century in action: the notion that every view, no matter how extreme or ideologically derived, is a ‘valid’ perspective, and that radical and largely dismissed pseudo-science should be given broad exposure and coverage because it represents part of a ‘debate.’ In this instance the only debate was between the journalists, trained in science and accustomed to making such decisions based on the content of programs, who decided the program was scientifically unmeritorious, and the stacked right-wing board of directors who put pressure on management to show the documentary anyway.

In other words, rationality and objectivity versus ideology and politics. No surprises which one wins out when three out of eight directors are far-right wing Government appointees and the others are from a ‘diverse’ (aka business) background. Of course it is completely irrelevant that global warming is perceived as an issue of great concern in the electorate, and that the Government which appointed the relevant board members is regarded as much worse than the Opposition at handling that particular issue…

Update: today’s Crikey points to this snippet in The Australian, which mentions that a far right political group covertly provided copies of the documentary to science journalists at a conference in Melbourne, and also gives us Tim Flannery’s thoughts:

Science journalist Robyn Williams asked eminent scientist (and Australian of the Year) Tim Flannery at the fifth World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne yesterday whether the ABC should screen the doco. That would depend, Flannery replied, on whether it was labelled as science, fiction or a piece of entertainment.